We counted: how much of a local business search is the wrong trade?

By 67Leads Team · Published 5 Nov 2026 · Updated 5 Nov 2026 (US Central) · 6 min read

We counted: of the 145,887 business listings 67Leads has collected for the trades it carries, 11,150 (8%) turned out to be a different kind of business and were withheld from sale, as of 5 Nov 2026. The rate differs by trade, and the culprits are predictable: tree farms in a tree-service search, supply stores in a contractor search.

Why we measured this

Anyone who has bought or scraped a local lead list has met the problem. You search for one trade and get the businesses next to it. Buyers describe it in their own numbers: one Outscraper reviewer said "only a total of 30 results were unique and useable" (Trustpilot); another said, "I paid for 16,000 leads but after cleaning the data only had 500 workable leads" (same source). A chiropractor marketer describing a vendor list got "an auto-responder from a hospital chiropractic department" among the replies (r/coldemail).

Email verification does not catch it. As one commenter put it, "Verification tells you if the email is sendable, but it doesn't tell you if the business row is actually good" (r/coldemail). A plant nursery has a perfectly deliverable inbox. It is just not a tree service.

So we published the number nobody else does: how much of what a search collects is the wrong trade.

How we graded every listing

Every listing that enters the 67Leads warehouse is graded against the trade it was collected for, using the category on its public listing and the business's own name:

• Core: the category is one of the trade's own, such as "tree service" or "arborist service" for tree care, or the name makes the trade unmistakable. 128,031 listings, 88%.
• Adjacent: a neighbouring category, such as a landscaper that also removes trees. Kept and sold, but labelled in the export's relevance column so a buyer can leave them out. 6,706 listings, 5%.
• Off-trade (rejected): a category that is a different business, such as a Christmas tree farm or a garden center in a tree-service search, or a category no trade list ever wants, such as a dental office, a hotel or a school. Withheld from every search, count and export. 11,150 listings, 8%.

Rejected rows are never sold. Opted-out businesses are removed from all three groups. The methodology page explains the grading in full.

The results by trade

Share of collected listings graded off-trade, by trade:

The full list of collected listings includes rows without a phone number, which is why "listings collected" is larger than the sellable counts on our lead list pages.

What the wrong rows actually are

These are the listing categories most often graded off-trade, with the trade search they turned up in:

The off-trade rows fall into three kinds:

1. Same word, different business. A search for tree services finds tree farms, Christmas tree lots and plant nurseries. A search for plumbers finds bathroom supply stores. The trade word matches; the business does not do the work.
2. Suppliers to the trade. Hardware stores, building-materials suppliers and supply houses sell to contractors and show up next to them. If you sell to contractors, a supplier is not your customer.
3. Unrelated businesses. Day care centers, hotels and preschools turn up because their name or listing matches part of the search.

What this means if you build your own lists

If you collect listings yourself with a scraper or an extension, plan for this clean-up step. At the rate in our data, 8% of a raw export is not the trade, and the share depends on the trade and on the search terms you used.

Practical checks:

• Sort by category and read the distinct values. Most off-trade rows are obvious once you see the category list.
• Watch the trade word in the name. "Smith Tree Farm" and "Smith Tree Service" share a word and nothing else.
• Decide what to do with adjacent businesses before you write the email. A landscaper that removes trees might buy from you; a pitch written for an arborist will not fit.
• Re-check after every new search term. Broader terms bring in more neighbours.

Our guide to verifying a lead list before you send puts this step alongside the email checks.

What this means if you buy lists

Ask the seller two questions: how is trade fit checked, and how many rows were removed for it? A seller who cannot answer has not checked. Then read 20 random rows yourself.

Counts that look too good are a warning too. One vendor's city page claimed "12K+ plumbers in Houston" (Openmart), while another vendor's file for the same city listed 853 (InfiniteLeadsHub). Both are vendor claims, but they cannot both be counts of the same thing. Compare any claim with the US Census Bureau's County Business Patterns, which counts business locations with paid employees by industry and state.

Limits of this count

• It is our grading, not ground truth. Grading uses the listing's category and the business's name. A misfiled listing can be graded wrongly either way, and we adjust the rules when we find one.
• It depends on our search terms. Each trade is collected with its own set of searches; different searches would collect a different mix.
• It covers the trades and cities we have collected, not every US business.
• It changes as we collect more, so the figures above are computed when the page is served.

Reuse

You are welcome to cite these figures with a link to this page. For the related published datasets, with CSVs, see our data studies; the stats pages break every trade down by state.

Questions

What share of a local business search is the wrong trade?

In the 67Leads warehouse, 8% of collected listings, 11,150 of 145,887, were graded as a different kind of business, as of 5 Nov 2026. The share varies by trade.

Why do lead lists contain the wrong businesses?

Map searches return businesses whose category or name shares a word with the trade, suppliers to the trade, and unrelated businesses nearby. Without a grading step, all of them end up in the export.

Does 67Leads sell off-trade rows?

No. Rows graded off-trade are withheld from every search, count and export. Adjacent rows are sold but labelled, so you can exclude them.

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Sources

1. https://www.trustpilot.com/review/outscraper.com?stars=1&stars=2
2. https://reddit.com/r/coldemail/comments/1tm1eg1
3. https://reddit.com/r/coldemail/comments/1sbfl7t/_/oq449lw
4. https://www.openmart.com/data/plumbing-houston
5. https://infiniteleadshub.com/b2b-database/full-database/city/united-states/texas/list-of-plumbers-in-houston
6. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html